Your face and ribs ache. The walk up the cement steps of the five-story apartment complex takes so much effort, and your muscles quake with each step. In the reflection of the dingy door windows, you can see your face: a scrawny eleven or twelve year old boy with dark hair and an even darker pop of a bruise on his cheek bone; the eyes looking back at you are exhausted but full of a stubborn and feisty fire. Keep going. Keep going.
A brown paper bag is clutched so hard in your right hand that the paper has wrinkled soft. Pinned between your other arm and your sore chest is the only other thing you could afford with what little money you had: a glass bottle of dark soda. The slosh is enough to remind you that you haven't eaten since early yesterday, and even then, it was only cheese between stale white bread.
Inside the apartment building, it's musty and run-down, yellowed from age and lack of care. It isn't a place fit for anyone to live, but you know that almost every room in this building holds at least three people or more. Roaches scatter on the stairs as you climb them to the next few floors. One or two lights on each landing flicker, go out, then struggle to wink back on. You can hear the bones of this place creak and pop beneath the walls.
On the third floor, you go down the hall toward the door to what you can barely call home. In one apartment, you can hear a woman crying incessantly as a man with a deep voice berates and slaps her. It makes your chest cold and hard. It's familiar. In another apartment, you can hear the deep bump of bass music which, even at twelve, you know is covering up the sound of bare skin hitting bare skin. Two people are standing in the hall outside their side-by-side doors, arguing, yelling, but you move by them to your own door as if you're invisible. You are. No one else here gives a rat's ass about you. You open your door, you go inside.
The front den is empty and hollow. There's a rickety plastic table big enough for a single plate maybe and two plastic crates for chairs sitting in front of a box television that you know only gets one channel from the metal rabbit ear antenna on top.
There are two small adjacent rooms connected by a bathroom, and you head to one with the soda and the paper bag. This room, when you open the door, is also empty save for one cardboard box and a single twin mattress with no sheets. On top of the mattress is a woman with long hair the color of a raven's wing spilled out across it. Beside her on the floor, there's a rotary phone, and a collection of pathetic offerings left behind untouched: a half a box of candy, a glass of tap water, a piece of bread on a plate, a baked potato in tin foil. You add the soda to them, another offering from you.
Tentatively, you ask, "Mom?" as you pick up the syringe laid by the other pile as an addition, the only thing that has been used.
It's hard to tell who your mom really is. Some days, she is cheerful and sweet. She calls you Jay, she washes your hair in the sink, she says you'll both go uptown to the rich streets and look in the windows. Some days, she's manic and wild, bitter enough to tell you that you act just like your father. She can't focus on any one thing, she can't sit still, she stays up for days at a time. And some days, she is sweaty and shaky, and mean. She yells that you don't care about her or her suffering because you won't help her get what you've brought her today in the bag. She hits you on the arm, on the back, and she cries. Her eyes are always disappointed.
"Mom?" you ask again, wondering which woman you'll get this time.
She doesn't stir, but that isn't unusual. "Mom," he you say, "I've got some, okay? And some soda. I got some."
You reach out to turn her over by the arm, and when you grab it, you realize... She is cold? She is colder than usual. She feels strangely cold, and... stiff, too. She doesn't roll over so much as fall over onto her back, and the eyes looking up at you are as empty as the room in the front. Stupidly, you say, "Mom...?" because you don't know what else to say. Your brain hasn't quite connected it yet.
It's joke, right? But she's cold. And she's stiff. And there's foam spittle running out of the side of her mouth. And you moved the syringe that had been dropped by the mattress. All at once, you realize, you're by yourself here in this room. No one else is here with you at all.
"Mom," you say urgently, and it isn't an ask this time. "Mom! Mom, get up. Wake up!" You grab her arm again and shake her; she's still as cold and barely budges. The backs of your eyes have started to sting. You thought your heart had stopped, but it's actually pounding so hard in your chest you can hear it in your ears. "Mom..."
You have to call emergency services with a small, hoarse voice. There's a heavy pit inside you, and no tears. All you can tell them periodically over and over is that she was cold. The policeman wants you to get in his car, but you don't want to go where he plans to take you, so you tell him you'd like to sit and get some air even if it's a lie. When he goes back in with the others and the coroner, you get up off the stoop of the apartment complex and disappear down the street as if you're invisible.
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